Cristian Antonio Leif Patterson

This is a personal post. It is not whimsical, it is serious. I'm a dad.
At 29 I'm sort of a young dad, but I feel old for two reasons. The first is that I'm from Utah where the average age for fatherhood is probably about seven years younger, and the second is that I'm the oldest of four kids and have looked forward to having my own children since I turned about ten.

Cristian Antonio Leif Patterson was born on May 1st, 2010, at LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah. He weighed 7 lbs 10 oz, was 21 inches long. He had a hairy head, dark brown, and huge bright eyes. As you can imagine, I thought he was the most perfect little creature ever in the world. That's a perfectly biased parent's opinion for you.

I am determined to raise him as well as possible. I'm convinced that he's going to have all the same weaknesses as I do, and since I've spent so much time battling them I know just how to help him along the way. I've also decided that he is going to be everything I wish I was: good-looking, tall, athletic, sociable. God likes to test my jealousy, and this is about as close as it's going to get.

His name is a bit of a story. My wife is Hispanic, and when we first talked about names, Cristian with no H was the first one she brought up. She's always loved it and always wanted to have a little boy named Cristian. I've only known one Cristian and he was this really cool kid in first grade, so I decided I'd go along with it. Considering that we both come from very different, very proud heritages, we always knew that we would give our kids two middle names, one from each side of his family. So Antonio is from her side, a Spanish name, lots of people in her family have it as a middle name. Leif isn't a family name, but Cristian is descended from Vikings on my side, so it was an appropriate reference. Half Conquistador, half Viking, this kid was born to conquer!

At the delivery, we could see the top of his head for a while, and I estimated the rest of his head was very small based on what we could see. It totally escaped me that babies' heads elongate in order to fit through the birth canal, so when the whole head came out it seemed enormous to me. At first it was just this long hairy head. Then his little features came, bloop, bloop, bloop, and there was a whole head sticking out. First thing he did was open his big, beautiful, eyes and stare around. Even before breathing. The doctor reached in and started twisting him and bloop, bloop, bloop, all the rest of him came out, long floppy arms and legs. Okay his arms and legs are tiny but at the time they were gigantic. Isabel's belly was pretty big but to think that something that size was in her was beyond belief.

Also beyond belief was how rough the cleaning crew was. He might as well have been made of asphalt the way they scrubbed him. Then the bath, which seemed soft but the way he screamed through it they must have been using wire brushes. Then the poking his feet, then the trying to get him to feed, then the awful trauma of being held by someone ELSE! Before we put him to bed on the second night I told him that he's a tough little guy, since he lived through everything the hospital had thrown at him.

Basically it works like this: I pull him off Isabel where he was warm and he starts crying. We swaddle him and hold him and warn him up, finally get him to make little content noises and then slip to sleep. Then the nurse comes in and wants to stick him in the foot and see where his glucose is now. Start the whole process over again.

And he has blue eyes. Very dark blue eyes but they've become noticeably bluer in the past day. His hair and nose are definitely from the Spanish side but his eyes are mine. They could turn any color under the sun so we'll see what they settle on.

I know this was long, but this is one of the most remarkable events in my life, certainly the second most anticipated event of my life. The first most anticipated event is when he comes up to me and says, "Dad, I want a Lego."